Posts Tagged ‘help’

Only one thing truly mattered to Barack Obama as millions of gallons of oil spewed out of the ocean floor to contaminate the Gulf Coast: that Barack Obama not be blamed:

President Obama may have decried finger-pointing today, but he also did a fair amount of it himself. Not only at the three companies, but at previous administrations.

Here’s what he said today when he turned the finger at the federal government:

“For too long, for a decade or more, there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That cannot and will not happen anymore.””A decade or more” clearly encompasses the Bush Administration, and may include the Clinton years too. But Mr. Obama’s been president for nearly 16 months. Does he get at least a little piece of the blame?

Not a bit, he made clear. He portrayed his administration as valiantly fighting the good fight against the oil companies from day one […]

Federal officials botched the government’s response, a local official and government and university scientists contended as the commission focused on the questions of who was in charge and how much oil spewed out of the well into the Gulf of Mexico.

Eventually, U.S. officials said the spill was about 60 times bigger than originally estimated. Instead of 42,000 gallons a day, the volume of leaking oil was closer to 2.4 million gallons a day.

“It’s a lot like Custer,” said panel co-chairman Bob Graham, a former Florida senator and governor, referring to the battle that killed George Armstrong Custer and wiped out most of the Army’s 7th Calvary in 1876. “He underestimated the number of Indians on the other side of the hill and paid the ultimate price.”

And who was in charge? Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, one of the coastal areas most affected by the spill, referred to another famous leader, this one fictional.

“It became a joke,” he told the commission. “The Houma command was the Wizard of Oz, some guy behind the curtain.”

Mistakes in the information that was being given out sapped confidence in the government on the issue, Graham and co-chairman William Reilly said at a news conference. Reilly described “repeated wrong numbers” on the amount of oil that was spilling.

I know who was supposed to be in charge: Barack Obama. But he’s a total incompetent failure, who is skilled only in reading aloud whatever a teleprompter screen prompts him to say, and demagoguing. And that’s why a crisis became such a pathetic and costly joke on every American citizen.